21 May 2012

*This post expands on some notes written for a screening of Waters of Timeand The Hungry Miles as part of Solo Show at Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland,
23 April — 17 May.*

left: Waters of Time right: The Hungry Miles

Waters
of Time and The Hungry Miles as more or less
contemporaneous documentary films, share an attempt at the illusion of truth in
their portrayal of aspects of docklands and their work. In both these are
clearly spaces and practices produced by Capital and Empire, however the two
films occupy markedly different political and aesthetic positions in relation
to waterside spaces and industry.

Norma Disher, Keith Gow, and Jock Levy made The Hungry Miles for the Australian
Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit in 1955. As befits the concerns of a
trades union the film foregrounds the workers, the hazardous nature of their
work, their importance for trade and industry, dramatizing their struggles for fair
employment conditions, countering negative perceptions of the wharf-side
workers and the doubtful reputation that they enjoyed, parodying the greed of
the ruling classes, while celebrating the sentimental resonance of the concept
of ‘mateship’ - the Australian male bonding that had sustained historical
workers’ struggles such as the ‘Eureka Stockade’, considered to be the
birth of Australian democracy – and the ultimate success of the Union in the
face of shipping company neglect and the continual struggle for reform.

The Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit is
credited with crossing “the two intentions of ‘art’ and ‘message’… harnessing
the formal innovations of the new documentary, [speaking] …for a group not
otherwise represented in the mainstream media, engaging in cinema as a form of
direct action mirroring the industrial and political campaigns which provided
the content of some of their films.” [1]

The Film Unit had earlier, in 1946, worked with Dutch
documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens to make Indonesia
Calling in Australia, which documented the refusal of Sydney dockside
workers to allow arms and ammunition to be sent for the Dutch colonial
government’s suppression of Indonesia’s independence movement. Ivens arrived in Australia as The
Netherlands’ East Indies (NEI) Film Commissioner. The NEI government was
resident in Australia at this time due to the occupation of the Dutch colony by
the Japanese.Ivens’s job was to make a
series of films documenting and supporting what the NEI government anticipated
would be their reoccupation of the colony (now know as Indonesia) following the
defeat of the Japanese, and to establish a nation building educational film
agency. However, following a mutiny by Indonesian seamen government office
workers’ and dockworkers’ refusal to load Dutch ships was supported by
Australian trade unions, demonstrations, petitions and actions to stall the
Dutch were organised, and seamen refused to man the ships. Ivens also walked
off and resigning his commission joined the anti-colonial movement, and started
to document the events unfolding on the wharves.[2]

Bill Launder and Basil Wright made Waters of Time for the Port of London Authority (PLA) in 1951. It
begins rather portentously with a quote from Tagus Farewell written by Thomas Wyatt, a 16th-century English lyrical
poet and ambassador in the service of Henry VIII, credited with introducing
the sonnet form into English.

“…with spur and sail for I go seek the Thames,

Gainward the sun that show'th her wealthy pride,

And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams,

Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side…”

Ostensibly following the passage of a ship from the
sea to the docks as orchestral music sooths and stirs, the film’s prose poetic
voice-over rhapsodizes in the clipped 1950s Received Pronunciation intonation
favoured as representative of the reassuring voice of authority.Here with Romantic allusion and simile we are
in negotiation with nature: the sea is made by God, the docks by man. The sea has
given up “her own”; the ‘landlubbers’ will swarm over the ship like ants,
taking the spoils from the lands of exotic far-off Empire back to their
anthills. A list of the names of port workers’ jobs (those ‘ants’) is a breathless
rhythmic mechanical prose poem, and like ants in the nest the workers are the cogs in the machine of this great industry, the list is read with an
obvious relish that belies the workers’ perilous labour and exploitation.

In this mercantile centre of Empire the shipping
companies are benign engines of industry compared to the greedy and criminally neglectful
shipping companies and their owners described in The Hungry Miles, all part of a teleological continuity moving on
the tick-tock of the waters of time. Nothing in the film, not even goods
brought in, escapes the over-weening lyricism of both the language and the
roaming camera “…from grape to barrel, from barrel to hold, from hold to deck
and from deck to dock… tick-tock, tick-tock…” …and the ships set sail back out
to sea to their cycle of inevitability.

This ‘International Realist’ production describes a
romantic vision of a vanished world and industry without which Capital and
Empire could not have been sustained, glossing them in the name of progress and
the consolidation of London as a modern world city.

Waters
of Time is literally and
figuratively shot from the god’s eye view of the Ruling Class and Empire, its
clerks and managers are benign officiators, it gives itself the ability to
imagine Docklands from the point of view of a gull in flight. The Hungry Miles presents the view from
the Working Class, echoing the bawdy humour of the music hall, the sharp tongue
of political satirical, and the militant collectivity in the grime of the
dockside. Waters of Time is the
propaganda of a ruler that has nothing to loose, The Hungry Miles that of the exploited with everything to fight
for.

Without the ability to traverse the oceans, without
the might and the will to dominate and exploit the colonies that it had
established, often, as in Australia, by subjugating the indigenous population,
Empire had little chance of survival into the Twentieth Century. The docks are
significant in this relationship, as places of arrival and departure for the
colonizer, whether deportee, émigré,
or government, and for the dispatch and receipt of goods for the enrichment of
the imperial homeland.The colonial
relationship of Britain to Australia could be thought of as characterized by
the differing approaches of these films, their thematic and their formal and
aesthetic approaches.

Basil Wright started his career with John Grierson, who
is often credited with the invention of documentary (at least as a term) and
with a particular intent to represent ‘reality’ as a corrective to the damage
done by fiction and as a means for social reform.Where The
Hungry Miles’s call for social justice in the form of waterside workers’
rights is militant, perhaps revolutionary, there is no evidence of 'corrective' concerns
in Waters of Time,which speaks with the assurance of a
position that all is right with the world, progress truly is benign and workers
willingly participate in the colonial machine.

To accuse Modernism of an aestheticism that tends to
the hermetic and apolitical has become something of a cliché, and while Wright et al may have been bringing a new
formally inventive approach to the documentary form, as a promo for what is
effectively a QANGO it is no surprise that Waters
of Time is a lyrical romantic meander with good reason to avoid overt class
politics.

To read the film contrapuntally,
as Edward Said might have had it[3],
is complicated by the fact that it is already intentionally propagandist, its
pernicious idealism consists precisely in the fact that the pictorial and
lyrically poetic are used as aestheticized political tools by a dominant ruler
quietly convinced of its superiority in the class struggle. It is just as
propagandist as the more strident, in-your-face militancy of the The Hungry Miles.

In considering these two films together it is possible
to think of an ‘antipodean’ relationship, which is not to simply characterize
geographical, class, or colonial binaries in historical connection between
Britain and Australasia - in this alone we have already identified three
binaries, or six points of reference immediately upping the complexity ante. In
this the ‘antipodean’ describes a line that links two different, but crucially not opposite,
points, characterizing the symbiotic relationship of Empire to that which is
exploited to sustain it, a line once borne on the trade winds, traced
across water.

23 April 2012

Waters of Time as described by the City of Future Documentary Films which would appear to be an subset of orphaned data from vads.ahds.ac.uk - which is the now defunct AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service)